Asia home to world's fastest broadband, Australia lags

By James W. Manning

Australia's broadband speeds improved over the past year, but continued to lag behind the US, Britain, and Asia, which has solidified its place as the world's epicentre for top-speed internet access.

Australia ranked 30th in the world with an average peak connection speed of 30.1 megabits per second (Mbps), according to Akamai's latest State of the Internet report. This is a 32 per cent increase from the same period a year ago, when the nation ranked 36th with an average peak speed of 22.8 Mbps.

Broadband speeds: Australia improved but remained on the edge of the top 30 countries.

Peak speeds refer to the maximum speeds achievable online, but do not represent what users experience all the time. In terms of the average speed overall, Australia came in 43rd with 5.5 Mbps. This was a 28 per cent increase from 4.3 Mbps a year ago, but a drop from 40th place in the world.

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While speeds in Australia were ahead of both the global average peak connection speed (17.9 Mbps) and the overall average (non-peak) speed (3.6 Mbps), they continued to lag behind many other developed countries.

Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull said during the 2013 federal election the Coalition's fibre-to-the-node national broadband network (NBN) would deliver minimum speeds of 25 Mbps, although NBN Co has since withdrawn that guarantee.

The top four places in the world, ranked by their average peak connection speeds, were in Asia. Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan and Singapore had the fastest broadband, in that order, according to the study. With Taiwan placing eighth, Asia made up half of the top 10.

Nearly all of the major Asian markets improved their peak speeds by at least 12 per cent compared with the previous year. Indonesia was the only one that dropped – a 30 per cent decrease to 9.7 Mbps, putting it at 115th. India is the only major Asian market that came in behind Indonesia, with an average peak speed of 9 Mbps. China's 11.3 Mbps average wasn't enough to break into the top 100, either.

The concentration of high-speed internet in Asia could have positive economic effects that reverberate throughout the region.

"Internet – and particularly broadband internet – has become a key tool for social and economic development, and needs to be prioritised, even in the world's poorest nations," ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Toure said in a statement last year.

Israel, a fast-growing tech start-up hub, jumped into fifth place, thanks to a 55 per cent improvement compared with the same period in 2012. The rest of the top 10 was comprised of smaller European countries.

Mobile broadband

In terms of mobile broadband, Australia had an average peak connection speed of 16.1 Mbps and an overall average speed of 3 Mbps, according to the report.

Russia recorded both the fastest average peak and overall average mobile broadband speeds, with 49.8 Mbps and 9.5 Mbps respectively.

Meanwhile, Australia had the highest mobile broadband penetration out of all the OECD countries, according to a separate report released earlier this month. Australia had a mobile broadband penetration rate of 114 per cent with 25.9 million subscriptions as of June 2013, according to the report.

Finland, Sweden, Japan, South Korea and Denmark also had mobile broadband penetration in excess of 100 per cent, which suggests people used multiple connected devices such as smartphones and tablets. These numbers are expected to rise with the rapid growth in internet-connected devices – from smart watches and eyeglasses to fridges and washing machines.

Akamai is one of the world's largest internet content deliverers and cloud service providers. The quarterly report looked at traffic flowing through its global network from July to September 2013.

The top 20 places to find the world's fastest internet:

Hong Kong, 65.4 Mbps

South Korea, 63.6 Mbps

Japan, 52 Mbps

Singapore, 50.1 Mbps

Israel, 47.7 Mbps

Romania, 45.4 Mbps

Latvia, 43.1 Mbps

Taiwan, 42.7 Mbps

Netherlands, 39.6 Mbps

Belgium, 38.5 Mbps

Switzerland, 38.4 Mbps

Bulgaria, 37 Mbps

United States, 37 Mbps

Kuwait, 36.4 Mbps

United Arab Emirates, 36 Mbps

Britain, 35.7 Mbps

Canada, 34.8 Mbps

Czech Republic, 34.8 Mbps

Macau, 34.4 Mbps

Sweden, 33.1 Mbps

Figures are average peak connection speeds in megabits per second. Source: Akamai